Recently, I was lying in bed awake early in the morning no longer sleepy and yet not quite ready to get up and begin my day either. I have this experience very often. In many cases this is when I receive inspiration for what I consider to be some of my very best writing. It is also the time when thoughts come into my head of seemingly great philosophical, transpersonal and emotional import.
Most recently when this occurred, my mind went to romantic relationships and the enormous amount of surrender I have witnessed, in this realm, from some of the people I have known in this life.
For example, I have a handful of friends whose individual romance stories are different in terms of the specific details though the outcomes appear to be quite similar. All of these people had lived their lives for several decades as happy, mature, self reflective, intelligent, self assured people who had attributed words like, "straight," or "openly gay" to themselves. Then suddenly, often without any or much warning whatsoever, these same people all found themselves completely swept away in an authentic, incredible and very vulnerable experience of falling deeply in love with someone who totally defied their self imposed and lifelong expression with regard to what we call sexual orientation. Many people around them insisted they were always in fact bisexual but simply had been unconscious of it or for some reason unwilling to consciously admit to this fact until the person they fell for coincidentally showed up in their lives. I'm not sure I believe that. In every instance I'm speaking of, the people themselves flat out reject that view. At some point it doesn't even matter. What matters is that we live in a world where people, by and large, tend to assign to themselves or allow someone else to assign to them all kinds of labels, traits and attributes that they never, not even once, challenge from their time in the cradle until they arrive in their grave. Many people never challenge these things. They accept them unquestionably and completely. I have seen this in bold relief in my work as a psychotherapist and as a person who is simply on my earth walk participating in life and observing. So what is incredible to me is to experience someone who has had the exact same conditioning as the rest of us yet somehow finds a way to allow themselves to break away; to set themselves free. The cause, at that point, appears pretty immaterial to me. The actions speak for themselves it seems and those actions are very powerful.
And there's more.
Here is a question I've been asked a number of times. It will soon become abundantly clear why I am speaking of this specific question. Here is the question: "Raven, how is it you know people who are hardcore white supremacists?"
Over the course of experiencing and knowing myself deeper and deeper for many years now, I have come to an answer to that question that makes sense to me. It's not just about the white supremacists I know either. I believe I have a gift or whatever we may choose to call it, that I have had since birth. This gift consists of being able to connect with and befriend vastly diverse types of people with relatively little judgment and to comfortably hold seemingly competing narratives around it all in the process. In my lifetime, for example, I have had numerous straight, male friends tell me I was the first and only gay man they had ever allowed themselves to get close to. Over the course of these friendships, many of these men have revealed huge amounts of homophobic and heterosexist ideas and thought processes that I am able to hold with ease while maintaining and even deepening the friendships. At some point, I have found I simply have to accept the gifts I have and resist the extremely strong pull of the world and its various societies to turn every single positive attribute I'm able to recognize in myself into an opportunity for and invitation to self deprecation, self parody or self denial. Another potential answer to that question however, is that there are mysteries in the metaverse that we simply are not likely going to solve nor understand in our lifetimes.
So, yes, somehow as a black, queer man yes, I have found there has been a time or two in my life where I have had an acquaintance who is a self described and committed white supremacist. Yes. And the most serious of this small pack I have personally known found himself absolutely speechless when he discovered he had fallen in love with a black woman. His breath was taken away. But instead of dying he was reborn and refashioned. Hallelujah. Yes, a black woman. This man literally walked into a bar one night and it was love at first sight. He saw his soulmate--a term he didn't know about at the time--shortly after walking through the doors. He and this woman eventually married. He was still active in his white supremacy organization when they met. He soon disassociated himself from it. That however, as he soon discovered, was extremely difficult to truly accomplish. This is because people in groups and fraternities sometimes don't like to respect the individual choices of others who are perceived as not being in alignment with the control they themselves like to imagine they exert over these others.
The marriage did not last. However, it lasted far longer than many marriages do that I'm aware of. This mans previous history in The White Aryan Resistance, I don't believe, had anything to do with the dissolution of the marriage. I know both he and his ex-wife quite well. They both say this. What forces do you think could be at work in the metaverse where a man who previously took great pride in his hatred of all God's Nubian children finds himself falling in love with a black woman? What...Oh Lord...Oh Lord?
And there's more still. When this man connected with his future wife, soon afterwards, he became a mentor to young black men in his community who were at risk for going to prison because of their propensity for violence and general mayhem. He was familiar with prison. He knew anger and violence very well also. He still does this work with at risk black youth. He is still friends with his ex-wife. His new wife is also a black woman.
I have friends where one partner is Jewish and the other partner is Muslim. Both are very active in their respective faiths. Both have been disowned by their respective families. They carry on with their lives and their marriage and wish and send these family members their sincere love.
I know of a few women of sound mind and body who have married men who were already incarcerated in prison for very violent crimes and who have no chance of ever being released from prison. These women appear to be suffering from no recognizable mental disorder or no conscious need to bring unnecessary drama and pain into their lives. They do not appear to have some serious disconnection from what the rest of us might call "reality." What they do appear to all have in common is the certainty that they have made the correct decision about who they have chosen to presumably spend the rest of their lives with and the open heartedness to transform that certainty into true surrendered action.
I could tell more equally provocative tales from the romantic lives of those I've known but I'll resist that urge. For now I will simply allow myself to rest in what all of these people potentially teach me about the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit. Hallelujah.
©Raven/Sage Mahosadha
